thinking about and working on

  • gathering materials for a large-scale, archivally informed book on the polymorphic artist/designer/design educator BRUNO MUNARI.
  • Innovation (in 10 Keywords). Still tinkering with a short book that consists in a lexicon of 10 + 1 micro-essays written in the style of Raymond Williams’ acclaimed Keywords. The words are: Change > Progress > Disruption > Renewal > Evolution > Revolution > Invention > Tradition > Metamorphosis > Translation.
  • forever collecting materials on a cultural history of the 20th century approached from the standpoint of the “biographies” of new materials.  Chapters: “Rayon/Marinetti” (The Fabrics of Modern Times), “Glass/Terragni” (The Strange Tale of the Man of Glass [Who Was Made of Plastic]); “Luminous Aluminum” (A Biography of the Moka); “Cement/Gladkov” (Poesie Concrete); “Asphalt” (The Romance of the Tarmac); “Styrene Song/Queneau” (Plasticity); “Cardboard/Fuller” (The Dream of Paper Furniture).

unpublished manuscripts, other writing in progress

  • still interested in the history of public address systems and their impact upon the design of public spaces from the 1930s through the present as part of a broader inquiry into the prehistory of the electronic public sphere.

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topics on which I’m gathering materials

  • looking for interesting materials about the history of CARDBOARD, especially cardboard housing and furniture, not to mention poetry and stories about cardboard; ditto for a couple of other materials: VULCANIZED RUBBER, SILICON, TITANIUM, STAINLESS STEEL, CARBON FIBER
  • the history and design of DISCOTHEQUES and light shows
  • histories of KIOSKS, INFOPOINTS, and PUBLIC ADDRESS SYSTEMS
  • quantitative notions of selfhood: biography as lab experiment (from Jules Michelet’s Journals to Piero Portaluppi and Bucky Fuller’s self-archiving practices to the Quantified Self movement)

 other channels and websites